Indie Passion Fuels the 10 Best Games of 2012

In 2012, the best gaming experiences came from some quite unexpected places.

This was partly because so many big-budget games failed to materialize, having been delayed into 2013 or, as sometimes happens, just sort of fallen off the face of the Earth entirely. And the triple-A titles that did show up were often underwhelming.

But as the industry behemoths struggled, the fast-growing independent games scene was thriving. In this list of Wired's favorite games of the year, you'll see some long-in-the-works indie games that finally made it out this year, some small games that came out of nowhere with wild ideas that just clicked, an MMO that points to how the genre might thrive in a post-Warcraft world and other surprising successes.

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10. Hotline Miami

This game grabs you by the sides of the face and screams "PLAY ME!", and you have to. Hotline Miami looks like the early Sierra On-Line graphic designers took a cocktail of various recreational drugs and then invented Grand Theft Auto.

You play a violent thug who breaks into buildings and kills everyone. The difference between it and every other videogame with a similar premise is that playing Hotline Miami actually feels like what it represents. Your aiming is really touchy and enemies will kill you if you don't move quickly. But you're not timed and there's nothing pushing you forward. So there's this anxiety-inducing tension between vast periods of action and brief bursts of action: You can hover outside a door and plan and think and plot for minutes if you want, but then you gotta bust in and kill everything in a split second, or you're dead.

But you die and retry, and the moment where you actually pull it off is exhilarating. Especially when you do it by spraying and praying and manage to take out an impossible number of enemies, somehow, blood splattered all over you, all over the rooms, but you're still miraculously alive. And you run out, and suddenly the intensity of what you're seeing on screen -- the blaring, too-loud '80s music, the blurred-vision graphics which are slowly tilting and pulsating as if you are watching the world through cocaine goggles, which you barely noticed during the intense action -- becomes like a colossal hangover when you're just picking your way over piles of dead bodies to get out. Why am I doing this? I can't stop. -- Chris Kohler

9. Guild Wars 2

It took one of the most intelligently designed games of the decade to get gamers to imagine how MMOs might go on post-Warcraft, but Guild Wars 2 (PC) was up to the task. Rather than ruthlessly copying WoW as so many of its predecessors did, Guild Wars 2 brilliantly fused many of the things that made Warcraft special while inventing new solutions for the things that sucked.

Ultimately, Guild Wars 2 may herald a paradigm shift in the MMO genre. Where most MMOs hide their best gameplay behind 300 hours of lame quests and months of costly subscription time, Guild Wars 2 allowed us to fight football field-sized monsters alongside dozens of allies within hours of stepping into the game. For the first time in a decade, here was an MMO that respected our time. -- Andrew Groen

8. Far Cry 3

“Don’t look down,” Jason says uneasily as I climb my first radio tower, but that’s all I want to do. Far Cry 3's scenery spreads for miles in every direction, like Skyrim, but with lush tropics replacing the desolate snowy peaks. This 360, PS3 and PC open-world shooter has been described as "Skyrim with guns." It’s not an inaccurate comparison, but one that should be taken as a descriptor, not a measure of the game’s worth. Doing so would be a disservice: Far Cry 3 is lustrous and polished and more than stands on its own. -- Bo Moore

7. Fez

Fez, an indie game released in April for Xbox Live, hides its true self from you. The game's main thrust is that it allows you to rotate the game world 90 degrees at a time, rearranging the position of objects in 3-D space in order to negotiate obstacles. You can beat the game with just this trick and you'd have a good time doing it.

But Fez holds a deeper secret. It hints as much: Throughout the course of a normal playthrough, you will often come across mysterious symbols. These clearly aren't decoration – they're too consistent for that. So like anyone, you imagine you're meant to return later.

Getting to the bottom of Fez's underlying mystery means you're going to need to have knowledge of binary. You will need to know Morse code and you will need to have an understanding of obscure religious apocrypha (or know exactly what to look for on Wikipedia).

This feeling of an endlessly deep rabbit hole is what makes Fez so compelling. Not since the classic dungeon crawlers of the '90s have I had to use so many pencils and sheets of paper for a game. But instead of mapping out dungeons on graph paper, Fez had me stretching my brain and using areas of knowledge I had long filed under useless trivia. -- John Mix Meyer

6. XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Firaxis had a lot to live up to when it resurrected the cult classic X-COM strategy series, but the developer knocked it out of the park with an unforgettable experience for consoles and PC. You play as the manager of a government agency tasked with investigating an alien invasion.

The decisions you make determine the direction of the project, its research, its missions, etc. You command soldiers on the battlefield as well, and your tactics are the difference between the mission's success or your soldiers' "early retirement." Oh, and if you make bad choices, don't worry, the Earth will only fall under darkness and be conquered by extraterrestrials. No pressure. -- Andrew Groen

5. Borderlands 2

There are many parts of Borderlands 2 (Xbox/PS3/PC), the candy-colored shooter from Gearbox, that will get your juices flowing. Playing co-op with a friend and teaming up to take down gigantic monsters is thrilling, and listening to the ramblings of the game's cast of absurd characters is as much fun as going to a stand-up comedy show.

But the best feeling in Borderlands 2 is that moment when you down an enemy and see a bright, colorful object pop out. New. Guns.

A new gun can be anything. It might be a machine gun that shoots grenades, or a futuristic laser blaster or even a talking, robot sniper rifle. The real joy of Borderlands is that moment when you check the stats on your newest find, peer down its scope, pull the trigger and realize that it's your new love. --Ryan Rigney

4. Spelunky

Months after giving Xbox 360's Spelunky a perfect 10, I'm still playing it. Just a few nights ago I dipped in again for an hour-long battle for survival in its randomly generated caves and jungles.

At this point, most games would have lost their appeal for me. I play through a game's six-to-10 hour campaign, trade the disc into GameStop and buy the next roller-coaster action-shooter when it comes out the next year.

Spelunky is a different sort of game. It's a living, breathing ecosystem with dozens of moving parts that work together in endless fascinating, and sometimes terrifying, ways. It turns your Xbox into your own worst enemy. It will taunt you, egging you into coming back and back for more punishment until you either give up or finally master it -- which is one of the most satisfying gaming experiences you can possibly have. --Ryan Rigney

3. Dishonored

Stealth games are not very good, as a rule. And when a game tells me I can accomplish goals any way I want to, that tends to not really be true. Dishonored is certainly an exception to the first rule, and the second as far as I know. At one point, I had to sneak into a mansion and kill a guy. I realized at one point, after magically "blink"ing myself up to the rooftop and sneaking in the window, that I could kill him silently right then and there and nobody would ever know, and I could beat it out of there. But then I thought: Why not follow him into the mansion instead? And oh, was I rewarded for doing so, more than I expected.

Dishonored is all about the Blink move, which lets you teleport instantly very short distances without people seeing you. I typically feel like a big lumbering oaf in stealth games, but blinking makes me feel like an expert cat burglar. And the fact that you can quicksave anywhere and try things over and over until you get it perfect is a real thrill. Climbing high on rooftops with judicious use of blinking to avoid everything below is a thrill, something I wish was still in Assassin's Creed games, but I guess we can't have everything. -- Chris Kohler

2. Journey

So many videogames give the player control of a hero who, through the course of his epic journey to save the world, becomes a powerful badass who slaughters an entire enemy race. The brilliance of thatgamecompany's Journey for PlayStation 3 is it takes away every single one of those tropes and delivers a more memorable experience in the process, one which barely lasts two hours.

You're not a hero in Journey. You're certainly not a badass; your only power is brief spurts of flight. You never harm anyone. You might be a man, or a woman, or neither. And whether or not you save the world at the end of your voyage across deserts, through caverns and over mountains depends entirely on how you, the player, decide to interpret the imagery of the game's word-free storytelling.

Adding to the mystery of Journey is the game's inventive online social integration: Players may encounter a fellow traveler controlled by a random soul on the internet who might help you or might ignore you. You can't talk to them, but through play you might become allies or even friends. Or maybe the stranger will leave and you'll meet someone else.

Journey bucks all blockbuster videogame trends and opts for no violence, offers a shorter play experience, and leaves much of the story up to the player's imagination. It's a beautiful example of what videogames can accomplish when they embrace abstraction and emotion over hyper-realism and firepower. -- Daniel Feit

1. The Walking Dead

Game of the Year

The Walking Dead isn't just the best game of 2012, it's the game that defined 2012. There was nothing else this year like it. I don't think there's ever been anything like it at all.

This five-episode tale of two survivors, an escaped convict and an orphaned little girl, desperately trying to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic American South, is a must-play. If you haven't, you need to. If you don't like zombie games, this isn't a zombie game, it's about people -- people who feel more real than in almost any other game you've ever played. Not because of motion-captured facial expressions or any sort of technological gimmickry, but because of solid writing (and, it should be said, a comic-book visual style that runs in the other direction from the uncanny valley).

This Xbox, PS3, iOS, and PC game is a triumph for Telltale Games in a variety of ways. I've been covering the company since its inception, and though I've always enjoyed its games, all revivals of the point-and-click adventure genre, the studio never seemed to be getting the traction it was hoping for. Each big new license it acquired never really stuck, from Wallace & Gromit to Back to the Future. It had its core group of fans and didn't seem like it was ever going to break away -- until Walking Dead.

It's not just a triumph of the content, but of the delivery method. Telltale, for the last 8 years, has doggedly stuck with its core idea of delivering episodic content, a smallish chunk of gameplay every month or so. Before Walking Dead I was starting to think it wasn't really working, that gamers didn't really want to play that way. But Walking Dead proved why episodically delivered games can be a powerful thing, especially in the age of social media. My Twitter feed lit up every time an episode was released and people had to share their latest thoughts and feelings on what happened around the virtual water cooler. By releasing episodically throughout the year, Walking Dead dominated the discussion for six months as other games came and went.

Also, as a fan of point-and-click games going back to the earliest games in the genre, it's great to see the formula get a revival that plays to more than just the fans nostalgic for King's Quest. To see an independent studio elbow the lavishly funded triple-A games out of the way. To pull off the emotional attachment to characters that Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire tried to do but fell short of. Walking Dead is not a difficult game to finish, but to be happy with the results you'll have to make tough choices, and that's where it hooks you. Some games test your twitch reflexes. Some test your wits. Walking Dead tries your heart. -- Chris Kohler